It may seem odd after my last post about increasing the spread of social networking by using Tumblr, Google Plus and so on, especially as I have never had the overactive social networking gene. I will carry on doing a certain amount but this excellent article by Ewan Morrison captures what is probably the acid truth. I don’t think it’s too current (I must ask him) but it confirms what I have long instinctively believed that the only winners in this game are the social media companies and the only losers are millions of hopeful e-publishing authors. And today, publishers and editors expect an author to ‘have a platform’ without which there is no deal. But how does anyone prove a ‘platform’ really exists and is not just a carefully constructed illusion.

Read on:

In the third in a series of essays on digital media and publishing, Ewan Morrison, who will appear at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, claims that as the project to monetise social media falters the self-epublishing industry’s defects will be laid bare